The situation
I was recruited to stand up an enterprise project management office at a fast-growing, founder-led healthcare-products manufacturer with several sites around the country. The company had real momentum — climbing revenue, major facility investments, an ERP implementation near go-live — and it wanted process and governance to match its size.
What was broken
Growth had outrun the company’s decision-making. Major calls — a multimillion- dollar real-estate move, a large facility build, an enterprise ERP about to go live — were moving fast without readiness checks or clear decision rights. In my first days, before I’d been given much context, I was asked to weigh in on closing a multimillion-dollar real-estate transaction. The pattern was consistent: speed without the structure that keeps fast decisions from becoming expensive ones.
What I did
The same week I started, a newly hired technology lead and I found an ERP go-live only a few business days out that wasn’t ready — the kind of launch that creates months of cleanup if it ships broken. I flagged the risk and advised leadership to delay. Then I built what the company actually lacked: documented decision criteria for major facility and design decisions — six explicit tests a big call had to pass — and reviewed them with the owner, finance, legal, and operations, so the criteria were shared rather than mine alone. Across multiple sites, I gave local leaders an operating cadence and a process they could actually use.
The result
The readiness risks got surfaced early, while they could still be acted on rather than discovered after the money was spent. Site leaders adopted the structure and the presence; where the documented criteria were used, the big decisions were defensible and traceable. Where a major decision was later reversed despite the documented criteria, the cost of that reversal — weeks of rework — was exactly the kind of expense the criteria existed to make visible and accountable.
Why this is the work I want to own
Governance only creates value when the people at the top actually want the constraint they asked for. That isn’t a complaint — it’s the most useful thing I took from the role, and it’s now central to how I’d diligence both a business and the person selling it before I bought. An operator’s discipline is only worth what the owner will let it be worth. As the owner, that constraint is mine to honor.